Sound Exchange

Pandora Artist Payments: A View from The Artist’s Side

SoundExchange has received quite a few questions relating to Pandora’s recent blog post, “Pandora and Artist Payments.” The post seems to convey the impression that artists are raking in millions of dollars from their Pandora streams. While we wish this were the case, these numbers do not reflect the reality for most artists represented by SoundExchange. Although in 2011 we paid out more than $292 million in digital royalties to recording artists and record labels, approximately 90 percent of annual payments to artists were $5,000 or less. In other words, not only are multiplatinum artists paid by SoundExchange, but also those “working class” musicians that very much rely on digital radio as a growing revenue stream. In fact, these working artists represent the vast majority of our artist payments.